Today we’re announcing the reduction of our minimum monthly fee from $50 to just $9.99. This rate includes your first 2,000 subscribed minutes. If you have an application that uses 2,000 minutes or less per month, you’ll save $40 per month with this change.

As the market for live video continues to grow, we want to make sure that the OpenTok platform is accessible to developers and organizations large and small, across the globe. We learned that $50 can be a barrier to entry for developers who are just testing, startups that are in prolonged trials before launch, or are in emerging markets.

We aren’t changing the underlying starting rate of $.005 per subscribed minute. Our goal with this update is to open the door to a broader audience and provide an accessible entry price point. For existing customers this pricing update will be effective for your account as of May 2, 2017. Your next bill will automatically reflect this new rate retroactively – no action is required on your part.

Since we launched the new version of our platform back in 2012, one of our goals has always been to make it very easy to manage and understand how your applications are performing. In addition to simplifying how to build applications, we believe that those are the key elements for a great experience.

Over the last year we have been working on a completely new way to interact with your TokBox account. As our user-base grew and diversified, it was obvious that our previous dashboard was not enough and needed to be extended. With the number of new tools and services that are in the works, we realized that it was a good opportunity to future proof our stack and give you, our users, a much better experience.

About a year ago we found ourselves scratching our heads trying to find a place that would give developers easier access to all of the tools that they need to get started with OpenTok. We already had a section for documentation but a lot of the tools and materials that we were working on didn’t really fit into the structure that we had. At the same time, we wanted to relaunch our website to better explain what TokBox can do for you, your product and your business.